To: xemacs-announce@xemacs.org
From: "Stephen J. Turnbull, XEmacs 21.4 Release Manager" <stephen@xemacs.org>
Subject: XEmacs 21.4.8 "Honest Recruiter" is Released.
Organization: The XEmacs Project
* XEmacs 21.4.8 "Honest Recruiter" is released.
"Honest Recruiter" is the ninth in the OXYMORON series.
Relative to XEmacs 21.4.7 "Economic Science", "Honest Recruiter" fixes
a long-standing bug where you need to do M-y twice to rotate the
kill-ring to the second-most-recent kill, and the bug introduced in
21.4.7 which caused loss of process output, crippling packages like
pcl-cvs.
See the summary of changes and detailed ChangeLogs below.
Also, because of the short interval between the release of 21.4.7 and
21.4.8, you will very likely be interested in reviewing the changes
included in 21.4.7. The announcement for 21.4.7 is available at
http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/21.4.7.html
The first release in this series, XEmacs 21.4.0 "Solid Vapor",
contained a large number of improvements and extensions to the current
stable version, XEmacs 21.1.14. For more information about the
OXYMORON series, see etc/NEWS, the initial release announcement
http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/21.4.0.html
and the release planning page,
http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/Public-21.2/
For general information about XEmacs, the developers, and the user
community, see our home page,
http://www.xemacs.org/
* XEmacs 21.4.8 is "gamma" software.
The usual "no warranty" disclaimer (see etc/WARRANTY, sections 10 and
11) applies. However, we are now experimenting with a level of
stability intermediate between "beta" and "stable", dubbed "gamma".
At this point all the developers and our beta testers trust the 21.4
code base with all their editing needs. Many have found it
sufficiently stable that they've moved on to the development branch
again in search of some excitement.
After several months of testing, XEmacs 21.4.8 has been shown
sufficiently stable to be recommended to all users. However, there
still remain a few outstanding problems with fontlock that must be
fixed before we retire 21.1. We now have identified the problems and
we hope to resolve these, and merge in a few remaining variances with
the Windows branch, for 21.4.9.
* Availability
Anonymous ftp:
ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/xemacs-21.4
See http://www.xemacs.org/Install/. (Note that the tarball breakdown
is slightly different from that implied for 21.1. For 21.4, the
xemacs-21.4.8.tar.gz tarball contains the full contents of the
xemacs-21.4.8-{src,elc,info}.tar.gz tarballs.)
If you already have a 21.4.7 source tree, a patchkit is available in
xemacs-21.4.7-21.4.8.patch.gz. This does not update .elcs or .infos,
they will be rebuilt when you make XEmacs. If you have an earlier
version, you can repeatedly apply patchkits.
Also, if you don't have the packages yet, see
http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/packageGuide.html.
Windows branch and installers:
The Windows branch continues to have a few changes not yet included in
the mainline. It is definitely preferred to the mainline for Windows
users.
Due to travel by the maintainer, any release of 21.4.8 as a binary for
Windows is likely to lag by some weeks. However, the current
netinstaller release, "21.4.7 for Windows [1]", already contains a fix
for the process output loss bug, and the "yank-pop twice" bug did not
affect the Windows platforms.
Therefore, 21.4.7 for Windows [1] is strongly recommended as the
binary installation for Windows users.
Anonymous (pserver) CVS:
Anonymous CVS is available. We are very grateful to the staff at our
host, SunSITE.dk, for a lot of help and quick reponse to all our
requests.
If you haven't used XEmacs CVS recently, we moved the repository
before the 21.4.6 release. The repository structure is the same as
before, so it should be possible to reuse an existing checked-out CVS
tree.
Take care that your Root is set correctly to
CVSROOT=:pserver:cvs@cvs.xemacs.org:/pack/xemacscvs
On platforms with a Bourne shell and find available, something like
for r in `find . -name Root`; do echo $CVSROOT > $r; done
will convert your entire tree.
Tags are also the same; to update to release 21.4.8, use the release
tag "r21-4-8". To set a sticky tag which will always update to the
current release, use the branch tag "release-21-4".
For more details, see
http://www.xemacs.org/Develop/cvsaccess.html
Unique branch and release tags are assigned to the Windows branch.
See Andy Piper's announcements and release notes for details.
--
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN